That’s what stayed with me – the inch that lingered between them; God about to turn on the television set or life or whatever you may like to call it. The dog-eared, yellowing pages of the Britannica that my mother bought at a throwaway price proving worthless as I wondered for days what would happen when the fingers met. Would Adam wince and cower as super-powerful celestial energy flowed into his finger or would he look blightedly doe-eyed, glazed and smug at the Almighty’s benevolence? Honestly, I preferred an exchange of blue, make that gold, electric current that lasted about five minutes between the two fingers till the energy died, leaving behind a panting Adam and a slightly ragged Almighty. But that image I credit to my later abuse and mania for all things animated and graphic.
There, buried in those musty pages, started what began the first phase of my life. Drawn only to aesthetics, high literature and art, and things related to the white world I filled my head with a pomposity that knew no bounds. I fast grew into a condescending and fastidious little bastard teenager who the parents found difficult to talk to, who read Rushdie on a perfect summer morning while the rest of the family played cricket outside, who dismissed the cousins as being too country, who was overtly critical of just about anything. My heroes were Byron, Einstein and The Beatles. I considered myself a Byronesque character – intelligent, gifted, and soon to lead a hedonistic life the instant I turned eighteen. It’s no surprise then that in the masochistic, jokeyist, and sometimes socialist world of a boarding school, I made few friends. They avoided me like the plague, which worked well for me for I hardly noticed any of them down my road to Haughtyville.
I turned sixteen. My heroes changed. I discovered hard rock and metal and learned that vodka could make me very happy. I was still the condescending and fastidious little bastard teenager and quickly learning how to slam doors shut just right so that the house shuddered a little bit. I’d drown my mothers’ pleas for me to study to Phil Anselmo and Ozzy. They couldn’t break in.
During the holidays, I’d stay cooped in my room going through music. I learnt it could free me in the sense that I didn’t need anybody as long as I had some smashing records to listen to and that bottle of vodka tucked away somewhere.
My father wasn’t too worried. He’d been there, done that. He is the essential seventies product. There’s a sepia toned picture of him and his friends, hair falling down to his waist, a guitar slung over his shoulder, smoking what suspiciously looks like a doobie. And he’s always been him, never quite shaking off the ‘happy days’ and 'staying with the times' like Madonna. But as a child I didn’t understand it. So much so that one day when I was saying my hail Marys (The convent’s doing. They insidiously doused me with Christ’s burden and my infantile brain had been touched. I had plans to convert), my father, after one too many whiskeys, smirked and said to me, ‘There’s no god, only rock and roll.’ I had been horrified at the thought off bartering my gentle son of god for The Rolling Stones. I guess if I have anyone to blame for me turning out to be a miscreant, I know where to point. That is why it didn’t hit him over the head that there was a monster brooding in his house.
During the holidays, I’d stay cooped in my room going through music. I learnt it could free me in the sense that I didn’t need anybody as long as I had some smashing records to listen to and that bottle of vodka tucked away somewhere.
My father wasn’t too worried. He’d been there, done that. He is the essential seventies product. There’s a sepia toned picture of him and his friends, hair falling down to his waist, a guitar slung over his shoulder, smoking what suspiciously looks like a doobie. And he’s always been him, never quite shaking off the ‘happy days’ and 'staying with the times' like Madonna. But as a child I didn’t understand it. So much so that one day when I was saying my hail Marys (The convent’s doing. They insidiously doused me with Christ’s burden and my infantile brain had been touched. I had plans to convert), my father, after one too many whiskeys, smirked and said to me, ‘There’s no god, only rock and roll.’ I had been horrified at the thought off bartering my gentle son of god for The Rolling Stones. I guess if I have anyone to blame for me turning out to be a miscreant, I know where to point. That is why it didn’t hit him over the head that there was a monster brooding in his house.
I don’t remember much of college. Most of it went by in a blur. There were the blue pills that got you tongue-tied, the pink to make you happy, the golden drops that made you dance, and the dolphins that made you, well… you’d know what I'm talking about if you’d done them. I replaced Phil Anselmo and Ozzy with a host of other heroes; Andy Warhol, Joni Mitchell, Nietzsche, Lewis Carrol, Tarantino, Joan Baez, and Skazi battled for space and definition in my numbed brain. I learnt that the city (and its people) could be wicked and soulful, that I could shine in it and that it could take me in its fold when I wanted to disappear. I grew to love it and hate it. Never being able to leave it and wanting to leave it every day, till the days between going back home stretched from months to years.
Then work happened and that changed everything. There no longer was a ‘we’, no idling, or bumming around. My head was no longer cramped with the banter of my heroes but rather other meaningless things had taken their place. Where Ozzy and Nietzsche once ruled, there was now a list of deadlines and getting that plumber to come in on Sunday. My friends were in suits and shoes that pinched and in conversations that didn’t seem fun or real anymore. This time, I have the nine to five to blame; it’s a wily and vicious killer, feeding souls to the shredding machine.
The other day while flipping through the pages of a travel guide to Italy, I came across it again. The inch, just at it had been years ago, waiting and teasing. That inch that I had stretched into so many years, filling it with everything I could, all my firsts and my lasts, sometimes worthless and, at others, priceless memories, seemed to tell me that, ‘it’ or life or, again, whatever you may like to call it didn’t change a darn thing. So the daily striving, the friends we made, the bruises we’ve acquired over the years are merely the passing of time. It didn’t change anything. We could only make it fun. We would always be just what we were, floating and suspended in relative time and space, in a state of limbo in purgatory, for that touch of life to be godlike.
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